Bloomberg Businessweek is under fire for its February 25 cover, depicting caricatures of greedy looking minorities in a house full of money.
The illustration was published with the headline “The Great American Housing Rebound” and is being called racist by people across the Internet.
Shanna L. Smith, President and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, voiced her organization’s outraged response:
“The Alliance condemns the use of an offensive and flatly inaccurate magazine cover used by Bloomberg Businessweek to define our nation’s experience with foreclosure and recovery in the housing market. We were shocked and dismayed by a Jim Crow era cover and its depiction of homeowners of color. It is so mind-blogging and even difficult to know what this news magazine was trying to convey. A more accurate cover would have depicted Big Bank CEOs and Wall Street moguls who provided monetary incentives to push predatory loans.”
“It’s important to know that our nation’s foreclosure crisis is the result of reckless lending that targeted borrowers and communities of color for risky, unsustainable loans even when they qualified for prime mortgages, she continued. “Skyrocketing foreclosure rates triggered by these toxic loans have led to at least one trillion dollars in lost wealth for African-American and Latino communities.”
The NAACP has joined the ranks of the offended and chimed in with its thoughts. “It’s racist and a mischaracterization,” the organization’s senior director of economics, Dedrick Muhammad says. “They are clearly racializing the issue by having mostly Blacks and Latinos, possibly only Blacks and Latinos, benefiting.”
Now the editor of the magazine, Josh Tyrangiel, says he has “regrets” about publishing it.
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